Again, a relatively short list (for me – in some years I’ve got up over 150 books), but for some reason I just didn’t feel as inspired to read this year – probably because I was so busy with everything else. One big part of the drop in numbers is because I mostly stopped listening to audio books, because the library app doesn’t work properly on my phone. So I switched to listening to podcasts while walking to and from work instead.
Total = 63 books
January (4)
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald (library e-book)
I thought I’d had a pretty uncreative year, what with lockdown depression and everything, but although it was mostly small projects, I did actually manage to get quite a few things finished.
An experimental maskand when that worked, a few more masksand then a lot more masksTūī in the Henhouse – a mini-quilt for Yetzirah, to celebrate 100 subscribers to my YouTube channel
September and October
Mostly making videos, but I did make progress on a few quilting projects
Well, that whole return to blogging didn’t last long last year, did it? And to be honest, this one probably won’t either. It’s mostly because vlogging has taken over a lot of the role blogging used to play for me, but also just that usual loop of it’s been so long since I blogged anything, it’ll take me forever to catch up, so it’s easier to just set it aside for a bit longer. And then suddenly it’s 2021.
So I’m not going to try and properly catch things up (other than lots of photos of craft projects, mainly just so I’ve got something to link to for my annual round-up of what I made last year… which is a bit redundant, because it means this post and the round-up post will almost be identical…) Life continues in this weird what passes for normal (as long as you don’t look beyond the borders) state here in Aotearoa. We’re (except in the border isolation hotels) Covid free, and life has sort of returned to normal, except for not being able to leave the country, and always being a bit on edge waiting for the next community outbreak to shut things down again, and anything that needs to be imported being horrifically expensive or in short supply (that part feels like being back in the Muldoon years!). But otherwise, it’s easy to forget that the pandemic rages on everywhere else.
The being on edge thing has kept me in Christchurch for the Christmas break – I’d thought about going down to Alexandra, but knowing how stupid people can get around Christmas and New Years, and the inevitable huge parties, I was a bit worried that if there was going to be another outbreak, it’d be during the holiday period, and very likely somewhere like Queenstown. And much as I love Alex, the thought of being stuck down there if we went back into lockdown wasn’t tempting – especially if I’d end up working from home for months again, with the terrible internet down there! So I’ve stayed at home and had a very quiet Christmas – which has had the advantage of having plenty of time to get on with some craft projects (and some video projects – for once I’ve actually got a bit of a buffer of scheduled videos, so I don’t have to be scrambling to edit a video every week!)
And talking of craft projects, here’s lots of photos, in no particular order:
The project I’m most proud of is Birb, the wall-hanging I made for my niece. It’s a portrait of her pet cockatiel, and I was working on it off and on since sometime in the winter. It was a bit of a last-minute rush to get the binding sewn off so I could post it down to her for Christmas.
I based the pattern (very loosely) on a quilt I saw online somewhere that had a variety of different birds in a similar style, though I ended up changing a lot of the details as I went along.
I made a pieced back for it, because I had a few half-square triangles left over, so I decided it would be fun to try and incorporate them into the back. Even though when it gets hung on the wall nobody will ever see those details, I really like the idea that the back is interesting too – it’s like including a little easter egg 🙂
I’m really proud of the quilting – it feels like it nicely shows off how far my skills have progressed over the last few years 🙂 And I had a lot of fun coming up with quilting designs for each component.
It’s also the biggest quilt I’ve completed this year (I have made a couple of quilt tops that are bigger, but they’re still sitting on the pile waiting for inspiration to strike to get them actually quilted). Everything else has been mini-quilts – probably because they seem more manageable at the moment.
One you might have already seen if you follow Yetzirah’s blog is the mini-quilt I made to celebrate reaching 100 subscribers on my YouTube channel. I had a little competition where viewers could suggest a quilt theme, and I’d draw one out and make it for them. Yetzirah’s name came out of the hat, with the suggestion of hearts and batiks. She’d just been converting her chicken coop into a writing retreat room, so I had that space in mind when I made it. A gorgeous NZ-made batik ended up being the central fabric, so I called it Tūī in the Henhouse.
It’s another one where I incorporated a spare block into the back, this time as a label:
A mini-quilt that didn’t make it onto my YouTube channel was the one I very quickly made as a wedding present for two friends who’d converted their civil union into a marriage and threw a party to celebrate. They’re both major Star Trek and LEGO geeks, so coming up with a design to suit wasn’t hard 🙂
I had to Google the shape of the communicator badges on their shirts – I’m definitely not a Trekkie 🙂
And one that has already featured on my channel is a little Christmas tree that came from a rainy, I feel like starting something new, sort of day just before Christmas. I had a charm pack I didn’t know what I wanted to do with, so I just started playing, and this was the result:
Plus, I finally got round to finishing off the last of the Christmas mini-quilts I started years ago (I just checked – it was in 2017! That was when I finally learnt the lesson that making anything in bulk is boring, and I’ll give up half way through, so I really shouldn’t attempt it, no matter how much it seems like a cool idea to make loads of something so I can give one to everyone I know).
There were also lots of quilted things that weren’t actually quilts. Like the cushions I made as a housewarming gift for another friend. I half-jokingly said I should make her some cushions, and asked her what colours she liked. When she replied “rainbows”, I immediately had the (slightly over-ambitious) thought that doing something with a bargello technique would be fun, despite the fact I’d never actually tried bargello before (when has that ever stopped me?). I used bargello for one of the cushions, and then used the scraps from it to make a complementary design for the other one.
I also made a couple of hot water bottle covers, one for myself, and one for my niece (yes, I do make a lot of things for her – she’s totally spoilt 😉 )
This is my one,which started off as a mistake – I cut some of the pieces wrong for one of the blocks in the Sugaridoo quilt, so decided to use them for an improvised block, which ended up being a hot water bottleAnd this is my niece’s – I basically just wanted an excuse to use that forest fabric 🙂
This very small mat was made at the request of Mum, who wanted something to put under her kettle to reduce the noise when it boils. Her request was for something very simple, and red to match her kitchen. But of course, simple is boring, so I ended up experimenting with an octagonal log cabin (with limited success – it’s really hard to keep the angles on an octagon accurate as you add to it!)
I really love this fabric I put on the back – actually, I think I like the back more than the front!
Mum loved it so much it didn’t actually end up doing the job it was intended for – instead of putting it under the kettle, where it would be hidden, she’s got it out on display, under the fruit bowl 🙂
Another request from Mum was for a cat bed for Raji. He’s been overflowing his existing one, so she wanted one slightly bigger. So I bought some fake fur and adapted a dog bed pattern:
It ended up very puffy in the centre – hopefully Raji is heavy enough to sink into it, and not float on top 🙂
I only finished it a couple of days ago, so I haven’t had a chance to get it posted down to her yet – I’ll do that once the post office opens on Tuesday. I’m looking forward to finding out whether it gets Raji’s seal of approval (Parsnips sniffed at it once, and hasn’t gone near it since).
In other non-quilting craft projects, I also made another big pile of bunting for the union, this time in Pasifika fabrics:
This is some of it hanging in the corridor outside my office – we had a competition in our building to decorate the hallways for Christmas, and our floor (which we share with the Pacific Research Centre) decided to go for a “Pacific Wonderland” theme.
And of course, like everyone with access to a sewing machine, made many, many, many masks for friends and family (and a few for myself).
I had to make at least one with cats on it 🙂
And finally for the completed projects, I made noticeboards for my craft room/study, so I can finally stop trying to stick pins directly into the walls:
If I actually posted here more often, you’d have noticed that everything looked a bit weird around here for a week or two, because the WordPress theme I was using broke, so the site reverted to a default, and everything went ugly. But thankfully our fearless leader Steve was able to update the theme (which, apparently, I’m the only person left using), so all is back to normal, and my carefully crafted (i.e. thrown together in a lunch hour) banner and background are back in their rightful places again.
I’m gaining even more appreciation for the work Steve does on this site, because I’ve been working on some of our WP sites for work, which has involved me dipping my toes into php for the first time ever. It’s a tricky language to get your head around, but I’ve managed to successfully tweak a couple of things, so I’m feeling very proud of myself.
In more relevant news, so there’s this pandemic thing. And the whole country has been in lockdown for the last 4 weeks (I’ve actually been in lockdown a few more days than that, because diabetes puts me in a high-risk category, so I went into self-isolation as soon as we hit Level 2 (explanation of our alert levels, for the non-NZers)). Luckily, my work can pretty much be done from home. Well, in theory at least – the reality has been that I’ve found it incredibly hard to focus working at home. I’m taking comfort from the TEU’s frequent reminders that this is not working from home, it’s working at home during a crisis, so a reduction in productivity is only to be expected. Also, I’ve discovered that if I leave the house every morning and walk around the block, I can somehow convince my brain that I’ve “gone to work”, and get myself more into work mode than if I just go straight from the kitchen to the study. But complaints aside, I’m so thankful to have the kind of work that I can keep doing (and being paid for!) even during lockdown, yet still be safeguarding my health. I’m also incredibly thankful to be living in New Zealand, where our government acted so quickly and effectively to contain the spread of the virus.
It’s turned out to be perfect timing for having Nephew and NOL living here, too! They’ve been wonderful about doing essential grocery and pharmacy shopping for me, so that I don’t have to expose myself to risk. We decided to keep to our own “bubbles”, seeing as they’re having a bit more contact with the world than I am, so we’ve got a system of leaving things on the doorstep for each other (including their washing, which they leave on the doorstep so I can throw it in the washing machine for them, then I leave it out by the line for them to hang up, so they don’t have to come into the house). Being students (especially students whose classes are now all online), they’ve reverted to a mostly nocturnal existence, but we do still see each other to wave to or chat at a safe distance from time to time. Otherwise, most of our conversations are via Discord (though that was the case before COVID-19 too – this is a household of geeks 🙂 )
For a brief time, official advice was to wash fruit and vegetables in soapy water then rinse. Thankfully, that advice has now reverted back to just clean them before use as you normally would, because do you know how hard it is to rinse soap suds out of broccoli??? I was still amused enough by the advice to take this photo, though 🙂
My creativity has also suffered during lockdown. You’d think the fact that I spend all day sitting in my study (which doubles as – or perhaps primarily is – my sewing room) would mean I’d be stealing every free minute in my day to work on quilts. But actually, other than trying to keep up with the two quiltalongs, I’ve done very little. Sitting in front of Netflix or YouTube seems to be the most my brain is capable at the moment. But hopefully, now that I’m starting to get into more of a rhythm with work, I can also find the mental space to be creative.
Working on the Sugaridoo quiltalong has been quite a creative process though – I’ve been having fun playing with the colours and incorporating a scrappy look to the rows
One very minor way I’ve been creative is quick paintings for my window. This was inspired by the We’re Not Scared NZ Bear Hunt which has people putting teddy bears (and all sorts of other soft toys) in their windows for kids to search for while they’re out walking (which is allowed for the purpose of exercise, as long as you stay in your local area). I didn’t have a teddy bear, so I drew one.
And then at Easter, the PM suggested we put pictures of Easter Eggs in our windows as a substitute Easter Egg hunt, so I added a couple of eggs. My window is slowly filling up… (and with the bonus of it stops the glare from the afternoon sun!)
Back before the lockdown, I did some real art! One of the events I went to for Pride Week was a life-drawing class. I’ve never tried life drawing before (well, unless you count some very quick sketches of people in the park from a distance), and I haven’t really done any proper drawing in many many many years, so it was a bit intimidating, and my first few sketches of the early poses were proof of just how rusty I was. But I was reasonably pleased with my last two attempts – her hands and face still proved beyond my drawing skills, but I thought the rest was not bad considering how out of practice I am!
The other cool creative thing I went to at Pride was a comics workshop run by Sam Orchard of Roostertails fame (and also friend of Alkalinekiwi). The workshop was a lot of fun, and I got to meet Sam properly (I had previously met him very briefly at NDF), which was cool. My resulting comic is not the most artistically accomplished (understatement of the week), but at least I enjoyed the creative process 🙂
There were a few other events I got to for Pride, but unfortunately, a lot of it got cancelled as the first cases of COVID-19 started to emerge in NZ, and restrictions started to be put in place.
And it wasn’t just Pride that was being cancelled – last weekend’s Bookcrossing Convention on the Gold Coast of course had to be cancelled (though we did have a Zoom call with as many of the people who would have been at the convention as possible – that was really fun, and so lovely to see all the friends I would have caught up with at the convention), plus Worldcon, which I was going to go to in July, has been turned into a virtual convention, so that’s another trip cancelled. On the plus side, no travel this year means the money I would have spent on those trips I’ve been able to instead spend on upgrading my computer – my nephew and I have spent the last couple of weeks researching all the latest technology and bought all the parts, so our project for this weekend is going to be putting all the bits together into the most epic computer ever (well, epic within budget, anyway 🙂 )
In other pre-lockdown, wow-it’s-a-long-time-since-I-wrote-a-blog-post creative news, I finished the ‘Garden City’ table runner to go with the placemat I’d made:
The binding technique did work out a bit better than with the placemat, but it’s not my favourite method though – think I’ll go back to traditional binding.
I also managed to finish the two chickens for my niece just in time for the last time I saw her, when the family were up to do some work on the caravan not long before the lockdown.
Niece had found some big beads to use for its eyes, which turned out wonderfully derpy 🙂This one just got pins for its eyes, because I didn’t have enough beads
And that’s about it for an update on life in the FutureCat bubble. I suspect life is going to carry on like this for quite some time, because even as some restrictions are being lifted, my high-risk category means I’ll still be staying self-isolated until the risk is much lower (or there’s a vaccine). But that’s ok, I’m kind of getting used to the solitary life. It’s a bit different to the social whirl my life has been for the past few years, but I’m still enough of an introvert at heart that I can cope 🙂 Can’t wait for the libraries to reopen, though!
It’s been all change here over the last few weeks, with Nephew #1 and NOL moving up to Christchurch and into my backyard. There’s been a lot of coming and going of both sets of parents to get them settled in, and to do some much-needed work to clear trees and make the back of the garden habitable. There’s still a bit to be done, but my new neighbours are in residence now, and our arrangement is so far working well – we’re settling into a nice balance of being neighbourly without being too intrusive into each others’ lives.
Still a bit of a shock though to look out my kitchen window and remember there’s a giant caravan out there!
Because of the steady stream of visitors and other disruptions, I haven’t managed to get a lot of craft projects done (or video editing – my backlog of half-edited videos is getting huge again, and it’s been a few weeks since I’ve managed to post anything. Good thing I’m not planning on being a professional YouTuber, because I’m doing everything wrong if I want to grow my subscribers!).
I have kept up with my various quiltalongs though. The Sugaridoo one is the one I’m enjoying most – I really love how the latest row turned out:
All the different rows are slightly different lengths at the moment, but that’ll all be sorted out in the final construction. And we’re not doing the rows in order, so that’s not the order they’ll be in in the finished quilt, which is why the colour combination looks a bit odd at the moment. If I’ve planned my colours correctly, they should make a lot more sense once its finished 🙂
I’ve developed a small obsession with making (or at least, starting to make – I’ve got three under construction, and none finished (yeah, doesn’t sound like me, I know 😉 )) table runners at the moment. They’re a nice way of trying out ideas without committing to a full quilt. Of course, it means I’m going to have a whole collection of table runners and nothing to do with them… I’m obviously going to have to throw a lot of dinner parties or something!
I did manage to finish a small placemat with the leftovers of one of the table runners (it was also a bit of a test for the binding technique I was trying out. It didn’t quite work out, but I did manage to figure out what went wrong, so the table runner version should be better). Nephew reckons it looks like a map of central Christchurch, with its mixture of grey and green squares.
What also might look like an obsession is chicken pincushions, seeing as I’ve made two more, and have plans for a further two. But really it’s just because I wanted three pincushions, so I could have one in each place I normally need one – one by my cutting mat, one by my sewing machine, and one to sit in the lounge where I normally do any handsewing of bindings etc. And the chicken pattern is quick and easy to make, and looks cute. But then when Niece was up the other day, she saw my chickens and fell in love with them, so I let her pick out some fabrics and promised I’d make her a couple. So that’s on my sewing to-do list too.
I just realised I put both their beaks on upside down. Oh well…
A lot fewer than in previous years. Partly a reflection of how busy the year was, but also just that I was spending more of my down time on other things (like YouTube and Netflix) instead of reading.
Didn’t finish any projects, but I started a few new ones… (this could have something to do with why I have so many unfinished projects!)
June
A random serviette, made from a scrap piece of linen
July
(It looks like I achieved so much this month! But it was mostly a lot of quick little projects, plus finally getting round to finishing off a few big ones I’ve been working on for months.)
So my sudden burst of trying to catch up didn’t last long. December got busy, not only with the usual round of Christmas and end-of-year social stuff, and a big project at work, but I also bought an extension to my season ticket at Little Andromeda (a really cool “pop-up” alternative theatre that opened in Christchurch in October), which I got with the intention of only seeing a few shows, but they kept adding more cool shows to the line-up, so I ended up again being out almost every night at one thing or another. (And they’ve managed to add another season February-April, which I’ve again bought a season ticket to, so yeah, expect me to disappear again very soon).
I spent Christmas and New Years down in Alexandra, mostly just spending time with mum (who hasn’t been well), and doing as little as possible after such a hectic few months. I did film a few videos while I was down there (making trifle, Christmas lights, and revisiting childhood homes), but otherwise just enjoyed having time to do nothing.
And I did manage to do one creative thing: my nephew’s girlfriend (I need to find a better way of describing her for my blog, seeing as she’ll be living in my backyard soon – Niece-Out-Law? NOL?) gave me some Dungeons and Dragons figurines for Christmas, and my nephew gave me paints for them, so I spent a couple of days trying to paint a couple of them. My eyes (or my patience) are definitely not good enough to paint fine details on tiny figures, but the overall effect isn’t too bad (if you stand back a bit and squint – in extreme closeup like this they don’t look so impressive!)
My plan was to come back from Alexandra and use my final week of my holidays to do lots of blogging and video editing, and crafty stuff, and generally catch up with all the things I didn’t have time to get done last year… and instead I got a cold, so hardly achieved anything at all. I managed a few little projects – catching up with a couple of “block of the month” style quilts I was a bit behind on (the Cosmos Mystery Quilt, which was my birthday present to myself, and which I’ve been filming shorts videos of each month and the Sugaridoo Quiltalong, which I decided not to film, because I didn’t want to step on the toes of the creator, who is also a (much bigger than me) YouTuber, and because sometimes it’s fun to just play with fabric without having to document it!), and finishing a video not-quite-a-tutorial of the Rainbow Aroha quilt I made last year for a union colleague.
The first two rows of the Sugaridoo Quiltalong. And the fabrics I’ve set aside for the rest of the rows of the quiltalong…“Rainbow Aroha”
Oh, and after getting frustrated with the falling-apart pincushion I’d been using, and seeing a very cute chicken-shaped* pincushion somewhere online (I really should have made a note where I saw it…), I made myself one:
It turned out so well I’m considering making myself a couple more, so I can have pincushions in all the places I need one around my sewing room (and the rest of the house…)
* For a very loose definition of “chicken-shaped”
Returning to my previous attempt to catch up on some of the other stuff I did last year:
Another small (though it took forever to design and execute) craft project was making myself a bag to carry all my diabetes gear. Everywhere I go, I have to take insulin, the various components of my blood testing kit, emergency snacks in case my blood sugar starts dropping, emergency jellybeans in base my blood sugar goes really low and I start going into hypoglycaemia (the dreaded “hypo”), even more emergency glucagen injection kit in case I get so hypo that I pass out (which, touch wood, has never happened to me, but it’s always a possibility, so I have to carry the kit (and hope that someone recognises what’s going on in time to give me the injection)), notebooks so I can work out the carbs in whatever I’m eating and record what my sugar levels are doing… it’s a lot of stuff. So I decided to make a custom bag that would hold everything I need. And of course I decided to make it as cheerful looking as I possibly could, because if you have to carry around vast quantities of medical supplies, at least they should be pretty and make you smile 🙂
Front of the bag. I got this fabric in a grab-bag of scraps, so I only just had enough to cover the front of the bag with it, but I loved it so much I had to use it.And the not-quite-matching back of the bag, made from another scrap piece of fabric.Inside, with lots of handy pockets and elastic to hold the various bits and pieces. And cats, because everything is better with a few cats 🙂
It’s still a bit bulky, but it was as compact as I could manage to get it while still having room for everything I need to carry. And it definitely achieves the aim of giving me something pretty to look at while I’m stabbing myself with all the various needles and lancets that are such a fun part of being diabetic.
Another achievement for last year was that I finally managed to finish the rag rug I’d been working on. It took forever (and a *lot* of old clothes cut up for rags), but I finally finished it, and was really pleased with how it turned out:
It now lives in my kitchen, and totally achieves what I wanted – having somewhere warm (and soft) to stand while I do the dishes. Plus brightening up the ugly old lino on the floor. And so far, Parsnips has only managed to pull out one of the pieces of wool (which I resecured, and she hasn’t shown any signs of being tempted to try and pull more out, thankfully).
The university finally appointed a Rainbow Advisor last year, so that our rainbow students get the support they need. In my Rainbow Te Kahukura role for the union, I’ve been working alongside them on a few projects, which has been exciting. One of the big things was Diversity Week (which was actually several weeks), a festival highlighting the diversity at the university. Between us we organised several Rainbow events, including a union-led barbeque for rainbow staff and postgraduates, a film screening, an exhibition, and a stall at the Diversity Market – an evening of cultural displays and food.
For our stall, we had cupcakes, which “customers” (actually, thanks to funding from the university, we gave the cupcakes away for free) could decorate with icing and sprinkles (the word “fabulous” was thrown around quite a bit in the planning 😉 ).
While we were setting up, we decided to decorate a few cupcakes ourselves, to provide inspiration. So I decided to see if I could create some of the various pride flags:
From top to bottom: – Pansexual pride (with extra glitter, because why not) – Transgender pride – LGBTQIA+ Rainbow pride (also with extra glitter, see above)
That started everyone else (we had several students from QCanterbury, the student LGBTQIA+ club, helping out on the stall) coming up with ways of depicting the other pride flags (given the limited range of icing and sprinkle colours we had, and the lack of proper piping bags), and we ended up with a whole collection (and a very messy table!):
From top to bottom: Row 1: Genderqueer pride Row 2: Intersex pride, Nonbinary pride Row 3: Transgender pride, Bisexual pride, LGBTQIA+ pride Row 4: Pansexual pride, Asexual pride
The College of Arts also gave us some funding for decorations for the various events, so Pieta (who’s on the College’s diversity working group with me) and I decided the best use of the funding would be to buy fabric to make as much rainbow bunting as we possibly could. Which turned out to be quite a lot:
The bunting got a lot of use, decorating all sorts of different events during Diversity Week.
These posters are from the amazing Out Loud Aotearoa project which (among other things) collected stories from Rainbow people navigating New Zealand’s mental health system.
And with the last bit of leftover fabric, I made a quick table runner which we used at the union barbeque:
I forgot to get a photo of it at the barbeque, so here’s one of it on my table before I took it into work
Finally, a few more photos of little things I made (or finished making) last year, which I don’t think I’ve posted yet:
I was up in Wellington for NDF in November, which happened to coincide with Discoverylover’s birthday, so she invited me along to her party. So I quickly threw together a little quilted bookmark as a wee present for her:
Remember those Christmas mini-quilts I started a couple of years ago with the intention of giving to all sorts of people, but ran out of time to finish? I actually managed to get a few more of them done! One of them went in my Bookcrossing Ornament Exchange parcel, and another went into a Secret Santa gift exchange at work. If I ever get the rest of them done, I reckon I’ll be all set for Secret Santa gifts for the next few years 🙂
One Secret Santa I made a special effort for, though. I got invited to the Linguistics department’s Christmas party, and the name I drew for the Secret Santa was actually the person who’d marked my thesis. So I was trying to think of something really cool to give her. Inspiration struck when I was listening to a Linguistics podcast (yeah, I’m a geek), and they were talking about a classic linguistics experiment, which uses an invented word “wug” to describe a little drawing of a creature (and shows that children are linguistically creative, because they can apply appropriate grammatical rules to a totally novel word).
One of the presenters mentioned that that you can’t really use the word “wug” in experiments like this any more, because it’s become a bit of a linguistics meme, and that she even had a coffee mug with a picture of a wug on it – a “wug mug”
That made me think about the other possibilities for decorative wugs, and I realised the ultimate would be a “wug mug rug”. So I made one for my thesis examiner:
Yes, it’s a joke that only someone who’s both a linguist and a quilter would get, but it amused me. And the recipient loved it!
Right, that’s as caught up as I’m ever going to get, I reckon. On to 2020…
After such a long time without blogging, I seem to have forgotten how to just sit down and start writing. So to ease myself back in gently, a photo-heavy post (which of course takes much more work than just typing stuff, so I’m not sure why I think this is easier…)
Anyway, this is going to mostly be going through my photos folder and posting whichever ones catch my eye.
First up, my birthday cake (or one of my birthday cakes – I ended up having two, one I ordered (and didn’t think to take a photo of, but it was chocolate and really impressive, and I was under instructions from my dietician to eat lots of it 🙂 ) and this one I made). I was following an online tutorial, and it was supposed to come out as a perfect rainbow. Obviously, that didn’t quite work, but the random weird swirls of colour it ended up with still looked pretty cool, I reckon. And tasted good, which was more important!
I’ve finished a couple of big quilts since I last posted photos. Well, one big one, and one lap-sized. The smaller was for a work friend who’d had a series of pretty major health problems, and then in the middle of all that, lost her mother. So Pieta, who I’d sewn the Healing Hearts for Christchurch blocks with earlier in the year, suggested we do another cooperative sewing project and make her a quilt. We came up with a general concept (lots of purple, because our friend is a big fan of Prince, and loves all things purple), but then our respective overly-busy schedules meant we couldn’t find any times to get together and sew, so I ended up just making the quilt myself and then handing it over to Pieta for hand-binding, but I still consider it a team effort.
I didn’t manage to get a decent photo of it, unfortunately. This was taken with it draped over a sofa at work after Pieta brought it in to show me the finished binding before she wrapped it up to give to our friend.
It’s a variation on a jelly-roll race quilt, but instead of being made from a jelly-roll, I just cut strips from various fabrics in my stash. Which meant I got a lot more variation in the length of the strips, which I think made for a more interesting quilt (and meant I could change the size a bit, to make it more square than a traditional jelly-roll race. The pops of yellow among the purple reminded me of the lights of houses scattered across the hill in Lyttelton, where our friend lives, so I called the quilt “Purple Town”.
Because it was a pretty simple design, I went a bit overboard with the quilting, with lots of feathers and Angela Walters-style improv quilting. I was pretty proud of how it turned out, and our friend loved it – she’s hung it in the entrance-way of her home, so it’s the first thing she sees when she walks in the door, which I think is the best compliment she could ever give it!
The other big quilt I finished was for Fuzzle, as a thank-you present for her coming down to look after me after my surgery (because I had almost no movement in my arms for the first couple of weeks, because if I tried to move them I’d stretch the incisions across my chest). The original plan had been for Mum to come and be my post-surgery nurse, but a health crisis meant she couldn’t make it to Christchurch (and was facing her own surgery and at around the same time as mine!!) so all my friends rallied round to replace her. My local friends took it in shifts to stay with me for the first few days (as well as bringing regular deliveries of meals and entertainment), and then Fuzzle came and stayed for the rest of my recovery time, which was amazing.
So one of my big items of pre-surgery prep was making her a quilt. I’d been playing around in my design book with ideas using curved log cabin piecing, and she lives by the sea, so this sea-shell shape emerged as a design. The colour choices were obvious – Fuzzle’s favourite colour has always been green, with purple a close second 🙂
I’m not 100% happy with how it turned out – I like the scrappy look of the log cabins, but if I was to make it again, I think I’d try and keep the tones within each colour more consistent, so that the seashell shapes stood out a bit more. I feel like my quilting (basically long arcs echoing the seashells) helped define the shapes though, so I was reasonably pleased with the final effect. And Fuzzle loved it, which is the important thing.
I did a lot of other little craft projects in preparation for my surgery, too. I’d been obsessively following all the top surgery videos I could find on YouTube, and noting down all the things people had found helpful to have post-surgery, so I could be prepared.
OK, and also because it was a good excuse to play with fabric 🙂
First up was a bag for carrying my drains. Basically an apron with big pockets, that attached round my waist with velcro. I didn’t end up using this as much as I’d thought, because I’d based the measurements on what I’d found online, and it turned out that the drains my surgeon uses are much bigger and bulkier than the standard ones used in the USA (which, of course, was where most of the information I was finding was from). They fit in the pockets ok, but because I had the pockets on the front, whenever I sat down (which was most of the time, see: recovering from surgery) the tops of them would dig into my stomach. So I ended up just carrying the drains around in my hands a lot of the time, and only using the bag if I needed to go out (like when I had to go back to the surgeon’s office for a checkup). I think something more like a holster, with two big pockets on the sides, would have been a better design than an apron.
Next essential was a seatbelt pillow. This I did find really useful, because any time I had to get in a car, having a pillow between my chest and the seatbelt made things a lot less painful!
I made one for mum, too, but this one sized for the lap part of the seatbelt, because her surgery was in her abdomen:
(very small photo because I forgot to take one, so mum took this for me later, and her phone has some weird settings)
And while I was stuffing long tubes, mum asked me to make her a draft excluder for her door:
Yes, it’s the same fabric as my seatbelt pillow. It was actually the fabric I’d used for the backing for Fuzzle’s quilt, so I had some long strips left over that I’d trimmed from the sides. I wasn’t just being mean using up scraps for the draft excluder though – it just happened to be a perfect match for the colour of her lounge suite, much better than anything else I had in my stash!
I also made myself a pillow with pockets, to hold useful things like the TV remote control. Not completely essential, but I had a whole load of scraps of nice linen fabrics I wanted to use. And it did turn out to be really useful – not so much for holding things, but for the first few nights, when I was sleeping on a recliner chair instead of in my bed, I slept with it against my chest as a barrier to discourage Parsnips from jumping up on me (although she was actually really good – she seemed to sense that I wasn’t up to having a cat on my lap, so instead of jumping up on me like she normally would, she spent most of the time sitting on the arm of the chair, as close to me as she could get but not actually on me).
I had two different ideas for the pocket, and couldn’t decide which to use, so I ended up making it double-sided, with pockets on each side. This side has one big pocket, and then the other side has two smaller pockets.
I purposefully made the pockets lie very flat to the pillow, so if there’s nothing in them, unless you look very closely it just looks like a normal cushion:
I loved how it turned out, so it’s still living on the chair in my living room, even though I don’t actually keep anything in the pockets.
(This is getting much longer than I planned, and there’s still a load more photos to go, so I think I’ll stop here for now, and continue with Part 2 another day.)
Yeah, so it’s been a while. But it seems that improvements have quietly been taking place with the DD site behind the scenes, and things that were broken are perhaps unbroken, and I’ve been prompted to actually write a blog post for the first time in forever.
Once again, I don’t even know where to start with getting caught up, so here’s just a random selection of news:
My surgery was successful, and I totally love my new improved body. There’s still a bit of swelling and lumpy scar tissue that’s slowly breaking down (and it’ll probably be a couple of years before the scars start to fade a bit), but I’m really happy. Totally worth it! (There are (of course) several videos if you want to see all the gory details: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQCyCJrez23-1jrxigUGYKZyG0k8GZoCQ)
This weekend marks a year since I was diagnosed with diabetes. There’s been a few ups and downs (the downs mostly being around a bit of food anxiety I developed, thanks largely to the (I now know wrong) dietary advice I was given right at the start when everyone assumed it must be Type 2. I still have the odd moment of anxiety about what I “should” be eating, but I’m slowly learning to relax and believe my dietician when she says I really can eat anything, as long as I balance my insulin appropriately.
At work I’m now officially the Lab’s manager (as opposed to the sort-of acting manager I’d been for the last couple of years). I’m very much finding my feet still with the new role – it’s got a lot of those kind of challenges you’re supposed to describe as “exciting” but are more accurately called “stressful”, but it also has a lot of good bits.
The Lab was moved into a new (well, newly refurbished, anyway – it’s been closed for a year for the last of the earthquake repairs) building last month. And in the juggling of people and resources that moving always entails, it suddenly turned out that there was an office going spare. So I now, for the first time in my entire working career, have my own office! It’s taking a bit of getting used to, after having worked in open plan and shared offices for so long (it’s a bit lonely sometimes!), but it’s also cool having a space that’s all my own – I’m looking forward to decorating it!
At home, I’m going to have slightly less space of my own next year, because my eldest nephew and his girlfriend are moving into a caravan in my back yard. They’re both coming up to Christchurch for tertiary study (Nephew at the university, and Niece-Out-Law at the polytech), and all the accommodation options they were looking at were horrendously expensive, so Nephew came up with a plan: for a fraction of what a year’s rent would cost, they can buy a nice, completely self-contained caravan (for my American readers, think something more like a trailer), and he asked me if he could park it in the back of my section. In return, they’re going to tidy up the back of the section for me, and pave the area where the caravan will be parked (so when they’re gone next summer I’ll have a nice outdoor area where I can set up an outdoor table and chairs), and generally help out with things like gardening and supermarket runs. They came up for a visit a few weeks ago so we could talk it all through, and I think it’s going to work out really well. Because they’ll be self-contained, they won’t need to come into the house (except for laundry, which we’ve agreed they’ll do during the week while I’m at work), so it won’t be any disruption to my life, and I’ll have all the benefits of having family nearby (like feeding the cat when I’m away!). And I get to help my nephew in a really practical way to take his first steps along his academic journey. So win-win all round 🙂
(There’s lots of craft projects to catch you up on too, but that involves sorting through photos, so they’ll have to wait for another time.)
So welcome back! And hopefully I’ll do a slightly better job of sticking round this time…
